She might have had a "spring in her step" from her second-place showing in the polls, but yesterday Mary Banotti was sinking slowly into a morass.
Dressed in tweed jacket, sensible trousers and the regulation pair of wellingtons, the Fine Gael candidate slithered through the mudbath of the National Ploughing Championships in search of votes. And with more than 74,000 people on site, there were plenty to be won.
Flanked by a subdued Avril Doyle and a bevy of other party TDs, Ms Banotti pressed the flesh of the rural multitudes.
Some mistook her for her sister, Nora Owen, and others for Mary McAleese, but most recognised the MEP and give her a polite hearing.
Mercifully, she made no claim to rural roots, though she did point out that cattle once grazed in her home suburb of Clontarf in Dublin and a famous battle was fought in the meadow there.
Under a veil of misty rain, Ms Banotti took a jeep out to view the ploughing action but declined an offer to drive the tractor herself. She traded small talk with the "farmerettes" but declined to say afterwards what she thought of the term.
It's that sort of election. Issues are for other people, other campaigns.
In the Fine Gael tent, one farmer said he wouldn't vote for the candidate if she was against blood sports.
Asked later for her views, she said farming issues were a matter for Government.
She promised to be a president for Fir na hEireann as well as Mna na hEireann.
The suggestion that the entry of Mr Derek Nally had given men something to vote for insulted the intelligence of men, she told us.
"The fir have nothing to fear from yet another woman president. After all, women had nothing to fear from six successive men presidents over 78 years. Did they?"
By afternoon, the weather was following the example of Ms Banotti's campaign, a dull start but then brightening up.
The sun shone as the candidate posed beside Charolais in the bull pen. "Someone has worked awfully hard on manicuring that one," said a passer-by, in reference to one of the cattle.
However, a storm was approaching. The Mary McAleese roadshow rolled in just as the sun broke through.
The two candidates collided head-on outside the National Ploughing Association tent, exchanging pleasantries and their broadest smiles for the television cameras.
Just in case anyone was in doubt about their mutual regard, they repeated the minuet a few minutes later, before rushing off down their respective mud-tracks.
No point in talking about bridge-building in these mucky surroundings, it seems.
Ms McAleese told us about her rural roots; her father came from a small-farmer background in Co Roscommon and the family still have a holiday home there.
She said she was "energised" by the fact that she topped the Irish Times poll, having "come from nowhere" in the two weeks since she got the Fianna Fail nomination.
"But I'm not at all complacent. There's a lot of work to do."
Like the other candidates, she plans to criss-cross the State over the coming weeks because "people are entitled to know what kind of person I am and to get the measure of me".
